brother. The comic parallels between their siblings and Thackeray’s main characters are inescapable. Laura is the bright one, eager to learn but confined to a domestic life in an English village, while her manly cousin Arthur goes boating at Cambridge University, and follows fashion and parties in London, just as John had done.
Dame Nellie Melba had visited Mount Pleasant. Cynthia dismissed the venerable old lady as ‘passe to a rather painful degree’. Cynthia was impressed by Melba’s accompanist, an Englishman called Stuart Robinson:
… most devastating voice and glorious personality, he (of course I don’t want to go on but it’s hard to get off a subject so attractive) … had the most marvellously cut suits that were a revelation to me, I’m afraid he would have looked rather silly in the sheep yards though …
She was looking forward to John’s next visit home, when he was bringing his friends the Wards to see the fine house, lined and furnished in Tasmanian timbers. Fred Ward was a designer eager to learn all he could about using local timbers. Cynthia wrote:
I hope the Wards will be unalarmed by the family, I should think they will find me a good restorer from the well behaved and correct critical rest of the house.
Fred had been sharing a house in South Yarra with John before his marriage, and hence already knew something about the Reed code of civility. John would be already dressed at breakfast, raising his eyebrows at Fred’s appearance in pyjamas. Fred also noted that John still played Rugby with his grammar school mates on Sunday mornings.9 He was in appearance and decorum most like his handsome father. The next letter opens on an ominous note: ‘I’m very unpopular with the family at present’.
Lila had announced that John was coming after Christmas, bringing only one male friend. Cynthia explained the source of her present unpopularity in a letter sent to John before he arrived:
I injudiciously remarked ‘How marvellous.’ … Everyone sat up and glared with disapproval … Tho’ why it shouldn’t be a marvellous thing when two males are introduced into this frightful atmosphere of femality I fail to see. Really one would think the place a blessed harem the way Dad stalks about with us flocking behind — do you realise there are eleven — 11 — women here, counting the maids? … Thank you for not coming over at Christmas, these family parties are too terrible — I always wake up on the 25th filled with gloomy foreboding. Anyhow there’s one thing, this year it’s on a Sunday so we won’t have to go to church twice in the one week.
Cynthia ended her letter on the duties expected of her:
Simon’s party’s on Saturday, the family misguidedly think that I’m going to push thirty kids up and down the drive in go-carts, so I can see more scenes for I consider my duty is to talk to the mothers, they don’t see through me as rapidly as the children do.
I’ve just been informed I’ve got to take the part of an Irish biddy in a big reading of three plays next week … I’m afraid good Australian will be continually showing through.
Her next letter was written shortly before their mother’s unexpected death.
At present I’m being amused by the female who is supposed to be keeping up my music. She exists on milk and oranges, has for years, and is an enthusiast for people flitting round in pieces of gauze, so you see even Launceston is not wholly devoid of people who believe in cultivating their own individuality.
What time she could garner for herself was spent reading and drafting a novel critical of the education girls endured.
Parents — Your Daughters has been started in well over a dozen styles, and I’ve already got infinite amusement from it. Now I seem to be going ahead all right, but I think the title will have to be changed.
Lila had made an extended trip to England, perhaps after Cynthia’s coming-out party. She had returned and seemed to regain her strength. It was Cynthia who cared for her when she was not well, but her letters show no sign of concern for her.
In late June 1928, on Wednesday, Lila had been to Launceston, busy as usual with people. Her sudden death was reported in The Mercury in Hobart. She was on her way home with the chauffeur Holmes, when she suffered a heart attack. Lila had outlived her mother-in-law by less than four years. She was buried alongside her in-laws in the tomb ground. Cynthia grieved wholeheartedly for her, marked by this untimely loss. Lila’s death changed everything; Mount Pleasant became Mount Unpleasant.10 As the year drew to a close, it seemed to his children that Henry was too soon emerging from mourning and already paying attention to another woman.
Cynthia spent all the time she could in Melbourne. She may already have met Bernard Heinze, but her affair with him probably happened after Lila’s death. A scholarship boy from Ballarat, Bernard, now conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, could show her a side of life she hadn’t known. A self-styled man of the future, emanating charm and charisma, Bernard had risen in society, using his talents and intelligence to succeed. He was studying in London when the war began and had served on the Western Front. At the war’s end he had studied in Paris and Berlin, before returning to Australia in 1923. Bernard judged people by their abilities rather than by their social status. Cynthia found freedom in his company; she would always be drawn to women and men who had the temerity and creativity to succeed on their own terms.
Cynthia pondered her future and thought she might pursue nursing, but was dissuaded by friends and family; she was thought too frail for the demanding work and too volatile for the discipline. Bernard was horrified at the thought.
Women were fundamental to Bernard’s success; a committee of women had funded his orchestra. One of Bernard’s ambitions was to modernise the music industry in Australia and to reach the size of audiences Pavlova’s had attracted. The practice of music was too commonly dismissed as the amateur province of politely educated spinsters. Bernard’s professional modernity was based on masculine practicality. He knew boys dismissed the violin and piano as ‘sissy’, and believed his mission was to give access to its many arts back to children. Bernard was soon giving concerts to school children, reported as Kiddies Agog, and would pioneer radio broadcasts to the nation.
The society magazine Table Talk carried a long article on Melbourne’s most eligible bachelor. His stellar career took off in 1926, when the university created its Conservatorium of Music with Heinze as its Director. Only thirty-two at the time, a youth in Establishment Melbourne terms, he was also the first Catholic employed at the university. The unnamed journalist professes surprise on meeting him. A clean-shaven professor, he looks just like a businessman, and moreover is just as interested in ‘the man who solves the parking problems’ as he is in Beethoven or Paganini: ‘His energy is boundless, his ambition the same. He has freshness and charm’, but no time or inclination ‘to settle down, ideals defeated … a cultivated Australian with a scornful eye for the trivial the humdrum and the dull’.11
In 1928, Bernard was thirty-four, Cynthia twenty. He opened up a new world of music for her, taking her to concerts at Melba Hall. He showed her the low-life of Melbourne entertainment at cabarets, and took her on long drives in his new motor to explore the countryside. Despite their differences in age and experience, Cynthia thought they understood each other because they were both ‘poseurs’. She might have fancied she could hear her father’s roar from his bedroom balcony across Bass Strait, and more distantly her grandparents’ groans from the tomb ground. Heinze’s grooming and diction had been carefully cultivated, while she played the part of a sophisticate. Cynthia would later reflect that with Bernard she had ‘lived in a trance’, and paid tribute to him for what he had given her:
the utmost happiness, the utmost hell, he changed my whole outlook, he made me see the sky was blue, and flowers were sweetest small. He gave me kindness and a great understanding.12
In the wake of her mother’s death and the uncertainty of her future, she was drawn to people older and wiser in the things she wanted to learn. She made lifelong friends in Melbourne, especially with the controversial psychiatrist Reg Ellery and his wife Mancel Kirby, a professional musician who worked with Heinze. One of Ellery’s closest friends was the radical cartoonist Will Dyson. Dyson, tiring of producing political cartoons Keith Murdoch would accept for